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By: Licia Corbella
Pipelines crusader Vivian Krause has uncovered evidence of U.S.-based efforts to keep Alberta bitumen in the ground.
Anyone in Canada who knows anything about the target on the back of Canadian oil and gas knows the name Vivian Krause. Everyone else should.
Krause’s name has become synonymous with the fight against the concerted effort by U.S. oil interests working to land-lock Canadian oil and gas by using environmental groups to protest against the industry with the stated aim of grinding development to a halt. Krause is a one-woman wrecking crew to the wall of secrecy behind that foreign plan, which she has almost single-handedly exposed by painstakingly following the money trail.
On Wednesday, during a speech at the Indigenous Energy Summit at the Grey Eagle Event Centre, the B.C. researcher extraordinaire warned the Indian Resource Council (IRC) of just what kind of opposition it will face if it pushes forward with a plan to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline from the federal government.
Krause warned the crowd that gathered on the Tsuut’ina Nation, on the western edge of Calgary, that she would be showing rather boring slides that prove that millions of dollars in payments from multibillion-dollar U.S. charitable foundations are being made to Canadian environmental groups annually, “because, frankly, if I was just to tell you who paid whom and how much, it’s hard to believe. It comes off like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory.”
She also warned the IRC — which represents 134 First Nations that have oil and gas resources on their land — that if it does move forward with the exciting and potentially lucrative opportunity of buying Trans Mountain and the plans to twin that existing pipeline, “you don’t just get the pipeline, you get a foreign-funded campaign along with the pipeline.”
Eight years ago, while researching who was behind an unscientific, misinformation campaign against farmed Canadian salmon, Krause “came across these three little words: Tar Sands Campaign” in the tax forms of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (which, ironically, made its billions from oil and gas). She saw that the foundation donated $1.4 million in 2007 to Corporate Ethics, “to recruit the groups, develop the strategy, create a co-ordinated campaign and act as a re-granting agency for the North American Tar Sands Campaign,” states CorpEthics.org, the group’s website.
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Licia Corbella is a Postmedia opinion columnist. lcorbella@postmedia.com
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